All in the Family: Tragic Horror Monsters in Ancient Greek Drama

Presented by Dr. Craig Jendza, Associate Professor of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, Denison University, Granville, Ohio. Bodies ripped apart, eyes gouged out, flesh melting off the bones — Greek tragedy often aims at the cultivation of horror. In this talk, Dr. Craig Jendza explores the nature of horror monsters in Greek tragedy. Dr. Jendza suggests that when horror monsters appear in tragedy, they are never purely external threats (as they are in some modern horror films such as Jaws (1975), The Thing (1982), or It (2017, 2019)) but instead are internal threats whose identities reflect the breakdown of the tragic family. With examples drawn from Aeschylus’s Eumenides, Euripides’s Hippolytus, and Euripides’s Bacchae, Dr. Jendza shows how tragic horror monsters operate within a network of divine and human causation to create a complex blend of tragic and horrific emotions — fear, disgust, awe, and pity. --------------------- Craig Jendza’s primary research interests are Greek drama, Greek humor and horror, Greek mythology, magic, and religion, and Indo-European linguistics. He loves teaching courses on ancient magic and witches, Greek mythology, Greek drama, ancient epic tales, Greek rhetoric, Greek and Latin language, and (perhaps his favorite) horror film and Greek tragedy.